What Does It Look Like When a Corporate Foundation and Its Parent Company Operate in True Alignment?
Five months into her role as Director of Social Impact at the Herbalife Family Foundation Pooja Jhobalia-Pelham was in New Delhi visiting a global nonprofit that creates stable homes for children who have been orphaned or abandoned, often in the aftermath of disaster. Walking through one of the village’s eight houses, she met a 12-year-old girl who had been left by her family at age six. The girl approached her quietly and said, without this organization, she might not be alive. She is thriving now. Good grades. Friends. Plans to become a lawyer.
Jhobalia-Pelham told the audience at EFG2026 that this child’s story is what the work is actually about — not programs, grant cycles, or transformation frameworks. Lives. That’s the tension the session held: how do you build the infrastructure that scales impact, without losing sight of the individual lives you’re impacting?
Thirty-Two Years of Impact and a Realization That the Model Needed to Change
The Herbalife Family Foundation was established in 1994 by Herbalife founder Mark Hughes, with a focus on childhood nutrition and nutrition education. Thirty-two years later, it operates in 74 countries and has distributed $72 million in funding through its Casa Herbalife grant program. The foundation has a stated commitment to reach $100 million by 2030.
Those numbers matter, but Jhobalia-Pelham was clear that scale alone wasn’t the point. The foundation had spent decades doing important work, but the work needed to evolve. The programs were built for a world that had changed, and the foundation’s strategy needed to catch up.
The inflection point came when Herbalife undertook a significant business transformation — marked by the company’s 45th anniversary and a deliberate question about what the next 45 years should look like.
- What does the next era of impact look like?
- How do we operate differently?
- How do we integrate purpose into everything we do?
As Herbalife’s CMO Hanan Wajih framed it, the foundation needed to be part of the answers, not running parallel alongside it. For Jhobalia-Pelham, the stakes of getting that right weren’t abstract. She then echoed a theme EFG CEO Muneer Panjwani set in the conference’s opening session about how the social impact efforts are literally saving lives.
“It’s not just changing lives. In many ways, we’re saving lives.”
— Pooja Jhobalia-Pelham, Director of Social Impact, Herbalife Family Foundation
The Distributor-Grantee Connection: The Structural Integration That Hadn’t Existed Before
The through-line Wajih and Jhobalia-Pelham returned to throughout the session is alignment as a structural requirement. Herbalife’s business identity is built around nutrition and active lifestyle. And the foundation’s historical focus on childhood nutrition was an obvious thematic fit, but the connection had been more parallel than integrated. The transformation they described was about collapsing that distance.
The most concrete example: a restructured grant cycle. The Casa Herbalife program is invite only. Its grants historically supported childhood nutrition and nutrition education. In the restructured model, the foundation introduced two complementary grant categories — one expanding into childhood wellness (physical and mental health, safe spaces) and one creating a direct mechanism for grantees to engage Herbalife’s distributor network. Distributors are the company’s largest donor base and the primary community touchpoint in many of the foundation’s markets. Building a formal channel connecting grantees to distributors was a structural integration that hadn’t previously existed.
The response exceeded expectations. Thirty percent of grantees requested funds for leadership and mentorship programming involving distributors. More than sixty percent requested funds for wellness programming. The demand validated the premise: when you redesign the framework around what partners actually need, you find out the old framework was leaving things on the table.
Is Your Foundation Running Alongside Your Company or Is It Embedded In It?
The three takeaways Wajih and Jhobalia-Pelham offered were deliberately accessible:
- challenge the status quo: are you doing things because they work, or because you’ve always done them?,
- make change at the DNA level rather than the program level, and
- treat transformation as ongoing rather than a destination.
What made these land wasn’t the framework itself but the candor around it — Jhobalia-Pelham stepped into a 32-year-old institution five months ago and has been moving fast precisely because she isn’t yet encumbered by how things have always been done.
The practical implication for other organizations is less about replicating Herbalife’s specific model and more about the internal question it surfaces: is your foundation running alongside your company, or is it embedded in it? The distributor-grantee connection is one structural answer to that question. The expanded grant categories are another.
The little girl who was helped didn’t need a perfect strategy. She needed someone to show up. And Herbalife Family Foundation did just that.
What the session argued is that analysis paralysis is the enemy of impact, that waiting for perfect strategic clarity is itself a choice with consequences, and that momentum, once built, compounds. The Herbalife Family Foundation’s story at EFG 2026 was ultimately about what happens when a company stops treating its foundation as a separate entity and starts treating it as an expression of its core identity. As Wajih put it, that kind of alignment requires more than strategy.
“Organizations that align the heart, the strategy and the courage, they don’t respond to the world, they help shape it.” — Hanan Wajih, Chief Marketing Officer, Herbalife